Top 500 Hermann Hesse Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “That’s like this: any truth can only be expressed and put into words when it is one-sided. Everything is one-sided which can be thought with thoughts and said with words, it’s all one-sided, all just one half, all lacks completeness, roundness, oneness.”

— Hermann Hesse

302. “I see that you think more than you can express. But, if that’s the case, you must also know that you have never fully lived out your thoughts, and that isn’t good. Only the thoughts that we live out have any value. You knew that your ‘permissible world’ was only half the world, and you tried to hide away the second half from yourself, the way clergymen and teachers do. You won’t succeed! No one can do that when he has once begun to think.”

— Hermann Hesse

303. “Most people, Kamala, are like a falling leaf, which is blown and is turning around through the air, and wavers, and tumbles to the ground. But others, a few, are like stars, they go on a fixed course, no wind reaches them, in themselves they have their law and their course.”

— Hermann Hesse

304. “Never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.”

— Hermann Hesse

305. “Lovers should not separate from each other after making love without admiring each other, without being conquered as well as conquering, so that no feeling of satiation or desolation arises nor the horrid feeling of misusing or having been misused.”

— Hermann Hesse

306. “When someone is seeking,’ said Siddhartha, ’it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.”

— Hermann Hesse

307. “That man is not yet a finished creation but rather a challenge of the spirit; a distant possibility dreaded as much as it is desired; that the way towards it has only been covered for a short distance and with terrible agonies and ecstasies even by those few for whom it is the scaffold today and the monument tomorrow – all this the Steppenwolf, too, suspected.”

— Hermann Hesse

308. “But I need to feel beautiful and holy things around me, always: music, mystery cults, symbols, myths. I need it, and I refuse to give it up... That’s my fatal flaw.”

— Hermann Hesse

309. “First you must climb the Mountain of Knowledge, then you must perform some deeds, and finally you must find love and become happy.”

— Hermann Hesse

310. “Quien no lleva dentro un lobo no tiene por eso que ser feliz tampoco.”

— Hermann Hesse

311. “Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them.”

— Hermann Hesse

312. “Be aware of too much wisdom!”

— Hermann Hesse

313. “You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”

— Hermann Hesse

314. “A thousand times I was ready to regret and take back my rash statement – yet it had been the truth.”

— Hermann Hesse

315. “Many verses of the holy books, above all the Upanishads of Sama-Veda spoke of this innermost thing. It is written: “Your soul is the whole world.” It says that when a man is asleep, he penetrates his innermost and dwells in Atman. There was wonderful wisdom in these verses; all the knowledge of the sages was told here in enchanting language, pure as honey collected by the bees.”

— Hermann Hesse

316. “Kamaswami conducted his business with care and often with passion, but Siddhartha looked upon all of this as if it was a game, the rules of which he tried hard to learn precisely, but the contents of which did not touch his heart.”

— Hermann Hesse

317. “None of us knew how terribly these two fine people suffered in secret. I do not think that they ever stopped loving each other, but deep down in their nature they did not belong to one another.”

— Hermann Hesse

318. “The water changed to vapour and rose, became rain and came down again, became spring, brook and river, changed a new, flowed anew.”

— Hermann Hesse

319. “Gratitude is not a virtue I believe in, and to me it seems hypocritical to expect it from a child.”

— Hermann Hesse

320. “Only when I found myself sitting in front of you did I realize that my wish was only half fulfilled and that my sole aim was to sit next to you.”

— Hermann Hesse

321. “Remember this: one can be a strict logician or grammarian and at the same time full of imagination and music.”

— Hermann Hesse

322. “Man is not by any means of fixed and enduring form... He is much more an experiment and a transition. He is nothing else than the narrow and perilous bridge between nature and spirit.”

— Hermann Hesse

323. “After having been standing by the gate of the garden for a long time, Siddhartha realised that his desire was foolish, which had made him go up to this place, that he could not help his son, that he was not allowed to cling him. Deeply, he felt the love for the run-away in his heart, like a wound, and he felt at the same time that this wound had not been given to him in order to turn the knife in it, that it had to become a blossom and had to shine.”

— Hermann Hesse

324. “The cup was emptied and would never be filled again.”

— Hermann Hesse

325. “Even as a child I had had at intervals a fondness for observing strange forms in nature, not so much examining them as surrendering myself to their magic, their oblique message. Long tree-roots, coloured veins in rock, patches of oil floating on water, flaws in glass – all such things had a certain fascination for me, above all, water and fire, smoke, clouds, dust and expecially the swirling specks of colour which swam before my closed eyes.”

— Hermann Hesse

326. “There I often walked along the shore, listened to the sea, and thought as I had done in my youth, with amazement and horror, about the sad and senseless confusion of life, that one could love in vain, that people who meant well toward each other should work out their destinies separately, each one going his own inexplicable way, and how each would like to help and draw close to the other and yet was unable to do so, as in troubled meaningless dreams.”

— Hermann Hesse

327. “Love of God is not always the same as love of good.”

— Hermann Hesse

328. “Time is not real, Govinda, I have experienced this often and often again. And if time is not real, then the gap which seems to be between the world and the eternity, between suffering and blissfulness, between evil and good, is also a deception.”

— Hermann Hesse

329. “I wanted to say a prayer and tried hard to remember one, but all I could think of was silly phrases such as ‘Dear Sir’ and ‘Under the Circumstances’. In my sadness and confusion I mumbled those.”

— Hermann Hesse

330. “I called the world of phenomena an illusion, I called my eyes and my tongue and accident, valueless phenomena. No, that is all over; I have awakened, I have really awakened and have just been born today.”

— Hermann Hesse

331. “Once it happened, as I lay awake at night, that I suddenly spoke in verses, in verses so beautiful and strange that I did not venture to think of writing them down, and then in the morning they vanished; and yet they lay hidden within me like the hard kernel within an old brittle husk.”

— Hermann Hesse

332. “But be warned, oh seeker of knowledge, of the thicket of opinions and of arguing about words.”

— Hermann Hesse

333. “I sped through heaven and saw god at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defenses and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart.”

— Hermann Hesse

334. “Among mathematicians, even in those days, the reputation of being a good Glass Bead Game player meant a great deal; it was equivalent to being a very good mathematician.”

— Hermann Hesse

335. “The world, my friend Govinda, is not imperfect, or on a slow path towards perfection: no, it is perfect in every moment, all sin already carries the divine forgiveness in itself, all small children already have the old person in themselves, all infants already have death, all dying people the eternal life.”

— Hermann Hesse

336. “Disclosing his wound to this listener was the same as bathing it in the river, until it became cool and one with the river.”

— Hermann Hesse

337. “I had considered myself some kind of genius and had considerably underestimated the toils and difficulties encountered along the path to an art.”

— Hermann Hesse

338. “A person or an act is never entirely Sansara or entirely Nirvana, a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful. It does really seem like this, because we are subject to deception, as if time was something real. Time is not real.”

— Hermann Hesse

339. “His life oscillates, as everyone’s does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousands and thousands.”

— Hermann Hesse

340. “The mother of life could be called love or desire; she could also be called death, grave, or decay. Eve was the mother. She was the source of bliss as well as of death; eternally she gave birth and eternally she killed; her love was fused with cruelty. The longer he carried her image within him, the more it became a parable and a sacred symbol to him. Not.”

— Hermann Hesse

341. “Like one who has eaten and drunk too much and vomits painfully and then feels better, so did the restless man wish he could rid himself with one terrific heave of these pleasures, of these habits of this entirely senseless life.”

— Hermann Hesse

342. “Until 1914 I loved to travel; I often went to Italy and once spent a few months in India. Since then I have almost entirely abandoned travelling, and I have not been outside of Switzerland for over ten years.”

— Hermann Hesse

343. “Were not the gods forms created like me and you, mortal, transient?”

— Hermann Hesse

344. “As far as teachers are concerned, they define young geniuses as those who are bad, disrespectful, smoke at fourteen, fall in love at fifteen, can be found at sixteen hanging out in bars, read forbidden books, write scandalous essays, occasionally stare down a teacher in class, are marked in the attendance book as rebels, and are budding candidates for room-arrest.”

— Hermann Hesse

345. “All interpretation, all psychology, all attempts to make things comprehensible, require the medium of theories, mythologies, and lies.”

— Hermann Hesse

346. “Every true reader could, even if not one new book were published, spend decades and centuries studying on, fighting on, continuing to rejoice in the treasure of those already at hand.”

— Hermann Hesse

347. “Govinda was standing in front of him, dressed in the yellow robe of an ascetic. Sad was how Govinda looked like, sadly he asked: Why have you forsaken me? At this, he embraced Govinda, wrapped his arms around him, and as he was pulling him close to his chest and kissed him, it was not Govinda any more, but a woman, and a full breast popped out of the woman’s dress, at which Siddhartha lay and drank, sweetly and strongly tasted the milk from this breast.”

— Hermann Hesse

348. “The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life.”

— Hermann Hesse

349. “A wolf of the Steppes that had lost its way and strayed into the towns and the life of the herd, a more striking image could not be found for his shy loneliness, his savagery, his restlessness, his homesickness, his homelessness.”

— Hermann Hesse

350. “No, my dear, how should I be sad? I, who have been rich and happy, have become even richer and happier now. My son has been given to me.”

— Hermann Hesse